Whenever we problematize the issue o f writing, we run the risk of making it unintelligible to the people we want to read it.
(Cosgrove & Domosh, 1993; 36)
If we accept that social enquiry should have nothing at all to do w ith claims to 'absolute knowledge' but should be rather more concerned with fleshing out and com plicating or even contradicting understandings (Hammersley, 1992; Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995), we then have an opportunity to develop a useful framework for understanding the practices o f everyday life. This is a framework built upon a firmly ecumenical approach to 'knowledge'. In terms o f w riting strategies this means that we should not be afraid of what Maffesoli calls "stereoscopic vision" (1996a: 14). That is, we should not shy away from eclecticism, but rather actively embrace a plurality o f authors and levels o f understandings both in our analysis and our re-presentations. People create different social worlds through their actions and imaginations (Blumer, 1969). Divergence between these social worlds should not be presented as a problem or flaw - "the fact that they disagree guarantees that our approach will be polydimensional" (Maffesoli,
1996a: 130). The introduction o f nuances into an understanding o f a society or culture highlights the firmly comparativist notion which underlies the "interpretative" method - a method in which the contradictory and the empathie ethnography are both elements. The stories, excerpts from stories and academic understandings that I present in the Night O u t that follows are thus at times contrasting. I would w orry if they were not, for even clubbers at the same club night might have hugely differing experiences o f that night. Non-contradictory re-presentation suggests either an overly structured interview 'schedule' or coding process, or / and pre-conceived notions of what one intends to 'find out' through the research. Furthermore, once we come to realise that
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interpretation of it, there is a conflict w ith the naturalistic realism upon which ethnographies are often premised (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995^^; Smith, 1988). I thus approach 'everyday life' more as reality immersing theories than as reality versus
theory, with theory, like any form o f knowledge, being produced by social practices and reflection upon those practices (Evans, 1988).
This thesis then, is certainly not about the search for, nor the representation of, the 'natural' w orld o f clubbing, even for the eighteen clubbers that form the focus o f the study. It is not about the quest to re-present the Night O ut 'as lived' or 'as it really is'. Rather, it is presented in the broad schematic form at o f a Night O u t both as an aid to understanding and in order to allow a slow build-up o f understandings o f clubbing as subsequent layers o f thematically-formulated arguments are progressively spotlighted and folded together. M y aims as far as re-presentation and evocation are concerned are three-fold: first, to re-present the clubbing experience as narrated and evoked by eighteen clubbers in London during 1996; second, to do so very explicitly through my own experiences w ith these eighteen people but also through my experiences immediately prior and subsequent to this year-long period o f intensive clubber contact (1996); and third, to re-present these experiences in conjunction with - and at times through a fusion or dialogue between - a diverse array of academic and non-academic literatures which provide understandings o f either the clubbing experience itself or constitutive elements w ithin it.
The understandings o f the clubbing experience re-presented w ithin this thesis are openly and purposefully designed with a number o f different audiences in mind. First and foremost, given the format o f the re-presentation, these understandings are presented as interventions within a number o f on-going debates in the social sciences, and w ithin British Social and Cultural Geography especially, although by no means exclusively. These debates, as I suggested through the starting points I outlined above, revolve around the nature, form and relevance o f contemporary consuming practices, about the significance and nature of relationships between identities and
identifications, about our understandings and conceptions o f the modes of young people's leisure and pleasure, and about the relationships between - and our understandings o f - notions of power and o f resistance.
Second, these understandings are more specifically presented for those with a
particular interest in the cultures, practices, spacings and experiences of clubbing. It is hoped that the combination o f depth and breadth o f the understandings o f clubbing re presented in this thesis may provide starting points for further and much more detailed
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research upon individual facets o f the clubbing experience. For example, dancing, the use o f recreational drugs, and the relationships between clubbing and other facets of the clubbers' lives are all worthy o f many theses in their own right.
Finally, and related to these previous points, these understandings o f the clubbing experience are - despite the potential problems of access to the thesis - presented for clubbers who might be interested in reading a relatively detailed and suggestive account o f what I propose are incredibly powerful experiences that might in some ways be similar to their own.
But now it is evening. It is that strange, equivocal hour when the curtains o f heaven are drawn and cities light up ... Honest men and rogues, sane men and mad, are all saying to themselves, ‘The end o f another day!’ . The thoughts o f all, whether good men or knaves, turn to pleasure, and each one hastens to the place o f his choice to drink the cup o f oblivion.
(Baudelaire, 1964: 11)
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